Political Constructions of the 1980S in in Country

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, n. º 8 (2001 ), pp. 105 - J 18 «AIN'T IT WEIRD TO DIG FERRARO»: POLITICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE 1980S IN IN COUNTRY JUAN JOSÉ CRUZ Universidad de La Laguna The funeral, black granite Vietnam War Memorial in the Washington Mali is the stage for the climactic scenes in In Country. It closes both Bobbie Ann Mason's novel of 1985 and Norman Jewison's 1990 film bearing the same title. The readers of both texts are expected to share the emotion Sam (Samantha) Hughes, Emmett Smith, and Mamaw Hughes experience when they encounter their past -as daughter and mother of a soldier killed in action and. in the case of Emmett, to expiate the emotional disorder that has affected him from his experiences as a soldier and a veteran. In sum, one can be prepared to meet the final passage of a rite of initiation that began when Sam graduated from High School (film) or when Mamaw felt the urge to go to the restroom (novel), in their way to Washington. Neither text is strictly related to the US experience in Southeast Asia. Ostensibly a Vietnam novel of the home front, Mason's In Country became an example of the ( «dirty») neorrealist wave in American fiction that explored life in minimalist, intimate tones. Mason studied the everyday lives of a group of common folks in Hopewell, Kentucky, as though it was Smalltown, USA. Jewison, for his part, ignored the whole subgenre ofVietnam movies in bis vision of the veteran's postwar. Both texts thus confer the Vietnam Veterans Memorial a special meaning. In Country works as a hypertext that crisscrosses the political arguments that permeated the l 980s. Mason and Jewison certainly criticize the conservative ascendancy in the decade; but their comments do not stop at blind attacks on Reaganism. A political rcading may give clues to understanding the failure of liberalisrn and the rise of personal politics. That the cinematic vcrsion is more compliant with issues of the individual 's sacrifice and American optirnism is not simply a concession to the political economy of popular culture in the United States. The different conclusions than can be drawn from either reading of In Countly should 106 Juan José Cruz refer us to the public's reflections in the following decade, that altematively elected Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. Masan 's novel criticizes a model of dernocracy that by the l 980s could be judged to be wholly discredited. Ironically, it had been that democracy based on liberal precepts that const.ructed the social and political ills that affect the characters of In Country. «Washington» had little to do with the Smiths and the Hughes of HopewelL KY. The breach opened between the civic education of the protagonists, Emmett and Sam, and the realization of what «America is ali about» can best be understood by their inclusion in a hislorical period when capitalism has reached its purest form. In Country discloses many keys of multinational capitalism, or as more conservative thinkers prefcr to call it, lhe postindustrial society. These characters have to come to te1ms with the rupture between their expectations as inhabitants of Mid America and the disruptíon of former submodes of production, economically nonviable. and therefore socially irrelevanl for the logic of corporate capital (cfr. Jameson 35). The ncoconservative discourse thal was gaining ground from the late 1970s had it that the five successive administrations between 1960 and 1980 exemplified the failure of liberalism. Enter Ronald Reagan to revolutionize the political system, and his chm·isma ensured bis reelection. The story in Mason 's novel takes place in the middle of the 1984 campaign. The Presidcnfs optimism resurfaces in the characters' discourses. be it Sam's wonder at all the «American energy» that circulates on 1-66, Lonnie's illusion about becoming a self-made man, or the determination of Irene, Sarn's mother, not to look back on her past. Jewison transposes his reílection to a later period. The film dates the story in the summer of 1989. Here the characters do not vindicate or discredit thc administration 's populism. Now they feel betrayed, or complacen! with the political heritage of the «Great Communicator,» or they just imply that his «legacy» passed them by. A cultural archaeologist could well understand the «flatness» of the Bush administration - especially before Desert Storm- in, say, the more cautious approach of thc young characters in the film to their future. Here the lack of expectations in the American promise is more recu1Tent than in the novel. where the readers confront the aggressive conservatism of the Reagan agenda. Reagan 's simple truths for a homogeneous, pre-Sixties nation where «hard work and prívate charity were ali that anyone needed» (Schaller 51) touched conservative Hopewell, where no one would rock the boat; as Emmett used to say, «the Sixties never hit Hopewell» (Mason 234). The conservalive longings for a more decent, plain America. however. <lid not realize how the country's economy was being irredeemably incorporated. Reagan 's America witnessed the craze for international merging as the instrument for progress in late capita\ism. But the liberal administrations were not to blame; the division of labor that precluded the negotiating capacity of the independent worker has political homologies not in the Great Society, but in the Coolidge and Hoover administrations with which Reagan's used to be cornpared. Sooner or later globalization in the making reaches Hopewell, and the town has its share of urban decay. Flag Day fairs are but pathetic efforts of the town's merchants to keep their businesses running. They will end up closing down, dueto the «Ain·111 Wcird To Dig Fcrraro»: Political Constructions of the J 980s in In Country 107 oligopoly held by the shopping center outside the town and the mall in Paducah, a location nearby. As we will see, the clash between nostalgic yeamings and economic libcralization will create an untenable situation for severa! characters in the microcosm the town represents. Hopewell's inhabitants do not seem to have the ability to circumscribe the failures of the Democratic administrations. Even Mrs. Biiggs, a neighbor of Emmett's and Sam's who lives on welfare, feels terror at the prospect that Jesse Jackson be elected President. The novel confirms the conclusion political commentators used to draw about the democrats' tuming into viclims of their own success. They altempted to cstablish an American version of the European welfare states, but ironically they lost social supports in the long run. As Irene proves in her decision to live in suburban Lexington and forget her past, a significant section of the American middle classes felt that plans for extending the social safety net beyond those devised by the Great Society threatened tl1eir status. Tax-conscious Americans were determined to resist thc cost of any further growth (Dolbeare 95; Derbyshire 45-6). Irene and her husband Larry Joiner express an attitude akin to that of the objectivists, for whom welfare anchore<l people in their misery, and only themselves and not the state could overcome their fate (Hamby 359). And the Reagan administration responded to the expectations of thc social groups represented by the Joiners: while the top 20 percenl of American households enjoyed an inflation-adjusted advance in their overall incomes of over 15 percent. the real income of the poorest 20 percent had fallen (Derbyshire 115). Both texts recall other forces that shaped the Reagan revolution in Mid America. The opening scene in the film, that of a Methodist minister at Sam's graduation eulogizing the spirit of sacrifice for a strong America, invites the spectator to reflect on the manipulation of religious feelings that the Christian ri ght accomplished in the first years of the Reagan administration. Although scarcely less indicting, the written tcxt comments this scene in passing, as one more element in the testing of Sam's anti-Establishment discourse. Jewison 's text enjoys the hindsight that permitled the viewer to contrast the marching spirit at the ceremony with the actual succession of fiscal fiascoes and sexual scandals thal surrounded the religious si<le of the New Right in the Unite<l States. More clearly than Jewison, however, Mason relates to the ascendancy of the Christian conservatism, including its influence on a legislative agenda thal opposed abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, and that eventually would make up a grand coalition with other single-issue conservative movements and grassroots organizations. They may belong to lhe American folklore via the Monkey Tria!, but Christian fundamentalists also managed to enter the suburban middle classes (Derbyshire 46; Hamby 356). Mason illustrates both instances in her novel. On the one hand, the mailbox of the cable-TV company clerk was destroyed, allegedly because the station exhibited R-rated movies; and an acquaintance of Emmett and Sam claims he does not Jet his wife watch HBO. On the other, Mason exposes a still more worrisome example: students cal! up Rock-95, the university FM radio station, to defend the Ku Klux Klan's bate speech, «they have a right to express their opinion,» they say (Mason 151 ). Religious fundamentalism becomes bourgeois also in the character of a former Vietnam veteran in Lexington, 108 Juan José Cruz who eventually redressed his life by taking an active part in his religious community. The construction of conservative extremism in In Country predates Alan Brinkley's reflection on the cultural wars of the 1990s. Brinkley points that a dormant but powerful section of the population had not assumed -much less legitimated- a set of elementary values about tolerance (Brinkley 1998:296; 1994:424-6).

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